Creating the British Atlantic

Essays on Transplantation, Adaptation, and Continuity

Jack P. Greene

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780813933887
• eBook ISBN: 9780813933894
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Set mostly within an expansive British imperial and transatlantic framework, this new selection of writings from the renowned historian Jack P. Greene draws on themes he has been developing throughout his distinguished career. In these essays Greene explores the efforts to impose Old World institutions, identities, and values upon the New World societies being created during the colonization process. He shows how transplanted Old World components—political, legal, and social—were adapted to meet the demands of new, economically viable, expansive cultural hearths. Greene argues that these transplantations and adaptations were of fundamental importance in the formation and evolution of the new American republic and the society it represented.

The scope of this work allows Greene to consider in depth numerous subjects, including the dynamics of colonization, the development and character of provincial identities, the relationship between new settler societies in America and the emerging British Empire, and the role of cultural power in social and political formation.

PART ONE

Perspectives

— ONE —

Hemispheric History and Atlantic History

HISTORIANS OF THE early modern Americas have always been open to the broader approach. Already by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, they had recognized and sought to subvert the tendency of emerging national histories to reduce the colonial past to little more than the prehistory of the independent nations that formed in the Americas after the mid-1770s. By insisting that colonial histories be contextualized, both as parts of the empires to which they belonged and as subsets of the greater process of European expansion, they called attention to the larger worlds in which early modern colonies took shape and to which they were intimately and immediately attached. Considering themselves what we might now call cosmopolitan contextualists, colonialists regarded those who tried to shoehorn colonial histories into the mold of the new states that were consequent to decolonization as parochial anachronists.

In this spirit, early modern colonialists have been at the forefront of the rush to adopt still larger perspectives over recent decades. Including the whole of the Atlantic basin—Europe, Africa, the Americas, and adjacent seas and islands—the Atlantic perspective, first articulated in the early 1970s and energetically pushed by fresh proselytes in the early 1990s, has been enthusiastically embraced by students of the colonial British world and has begun to gain considerable currency among scholars working in other areas of the early modern world that formed around the Atlantic. As a result, few early modern Americanists remain unconverted to the idea that developments throughout the Americas can be more fully understood when placed within the broader trans-Atlantic, inter-Atlantic, or intra-Atlantic settings in which they occurred. One of the central attractions of this perspective has been the prospect that, by calling attention to social, economic, political, and cultural commonalities and interactions among areas that either were not connected by national allegiances or did not remain within the same national state system, it would help to break the hold of the national frameworks within which history traditionally has been written, frameworks that have operated, not just to parochialize specific histories, but also to obscure the larger patterns and processes within which the several societies around the Atlantic functioned and of which they were integral parts.¹

Even more recently, a second broad and complementary movement toward a multicultural perspective has exhibited considerable vigor. Among early American historians within the United States, this perspective seems to have been the immediate consequence of a growing consciousness that some portions of the United States had a “pre-national” history that was neither English nor exclusively indigenous. Like the Atlantic perspective, this consciousness is not exactly new. Herbert Bolton was an ardent exponent of this point of view more than three-quarters of a century ago,² and his influence upon a few English colonialists—particularly Max Savelle, who produced one of the best and most widely used texts in colonial British American history—was by no means insignificant.³ But the proliferation of interest in the Spanish, French, and Russian origins of the United States among pre–United States historians is relatively recent and arises largely and logically out of two impulses in historical studies: an older impulse, deriving from the Annalistes' ambitious goal of constructing a histoire totale decentering elite white males, and a newer and more parochial impulse to give all cultures and regions space within the United States historical narrative. The latest manifestation of this multicultural, multiregional impulse has been the emergence of a demand for the creation of a continental history that would place the indigenous inhabitants at the center of the story and give as much attention to Spanish, French, and Russian colonies in the middle and on the western edges of the continent as to British provinces on the eastern coast.⁴

So far, I think it is fair to say that the recent interest of pre–United States historians in non-British areas has been largely confined to those regions that would subsequently become part of the United States. At least in its earliest stages, this development was a potential boon to those scholars who, having been marginalized in their own field of early modern Latin American history precisely because the areas upon which they worked—Florida, New Mexico, Texas, California, Louisiana—were no longer a part of Spanish or French America, now suddenly found a home in pre–United States history and a new and enthusiastic audience for their work.⁵ But it is also fair to say, I think, that the new multicultural interest in the non-British roots of United States civilization has not moved far beyond the borders of the present United States and has remained relatively unconcerned with the larger cultural worlds to which the areas of Spanish or French penetration were attached. Indeed, calls for a continental history often turn out to exclude significant portions of the North American continent to the south of the Rio Grande and to the north of the later boundary between Canada and the United States.⁶ As a result, the United States community of early American historians has continued to be largely uninformed about the extensive and rich historiography produced, especially over the last half century, on those larger Spanish and French cultural worlds. Incorporation into the national history of the United States has thus effectually dis-attached areas with non-British origins from the national cultural areas with which they were associated for lengthy periods of their early histories. Such decontextualization cannot be expected to produce comprehensive understandings of the histories of the areas that suffer it, much less to enrich them.

While the emergence of the Atlantic perspective has served to undermine traditional national frameworks, the multicultural turn has thus largely functioned to reinforce them. The central contention in these brief reflections is that this need not be the case, that the new interest in the non-English colonial histories of areas in the United States points logically in the direction of the desirability of a broad hemispheric perspective that, by promoting broad comparative analysis across both the Southern and Northern American hemispheres and their adjacent islands, might actually enhance the prospects for transcending national frameworks. Moreover, a hemispheric perspective also seems to offer better prospects for achieving one of the unfilled promises of the Atlantic perspective, the possibility of drawing comparisons. The developing field of Atlantic history has tended to concentrate on identifying and elaborating the connections that tied the Atlantic together and, as J. H. Elliott remarked, will probably “always…remain a history framed more in terms of connections than of comparisons.”⁷

The primary obstacle to the development of a hemispheric perspective is, of course, the dense historiographies that, especially in recent decades, have emerged in the study of all areas of the Americas, historiographies that require enormous time and energy to master.⁸ In 1999, at a conference of historians primarily concerned with the history of those parts of colonial British America that became the United States, James Lockhart and Stuart Schwartz, two of the most distinguished contributors to the literature on colonial Latin America and coauthors of an acclaimed synthesis, Early Latin America,⁹ endeavored to guide their audience into this wholly different and unusually rich terra incognita.¹⁰ Their remarks provide a foundation for the following speculations about the possible benefits of a broad hemispheric approach.

As both Lockhart and Schwartz made clear, the historiographies they represent stand in no need of intellectual colonization by pre–United States historians. Indeed, as Lockhart pointed out, pre–United States historians working on Spanish areas should not expect to make a significant contribution to this literature until they have mastered it. Devoted to the exposition of cultural complexes radically different from the British, with different laws, different if sometimes parallel institutions, and different social dynamics, those historiographies are based on sources unfamiliar to students of the British American world. The two presenters provided a powerful sense of how much there was to learn and how demanding such an enterprise might be. They made it clear that those who aspire to advance a more inclusive version of the pre–United States past would do well to hie it to one of those rare universities at which it is possible to study with equal seriousness the histories of all the colonial Americas.

Superficially and on a general level there seem to be many similarities between the historiographies of early Latin American and colonial British American history. At least until comparatively recently, both have been source-driven and both have followed Lockhart's well-known law of the conservation of the energy of historians: “Always take the easiest, most synthetic source first.”¹¹ In colonial British American history, the private narratives of settlement produced by such people as John Smith, William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Andrew White—the nearest equivalents to the Spanish chronicles of conquest—never acquired the historiographical importance of those chronicles, but both early American fields were dominated for many decades by studies based on official correspondence and metropolitan and provincial institutional records, an emphasis that grossly exaggerated the importance of the metropolis and provincial centers in the construction of colonies and empire. In pursuit of social history, both fields turned to legal records and notarial archives—or in the British case, to probate records, deeds, and parish and church registers. The absence of notarial records in British America may have been responsible for what I perceive to have been a lag in the turn to social history among historians of the English-speaking world, who took a bit longer to devise ways to bring the methods of the Annalistes to bear upon social history issues.

Between the earlier emphasis on institutional history and the advent of social history, historians of colonial British America used a rich cache of contemporaneously and locally generated and produced printed materials, including political tracts, political economy treatises, improvement literature, sermons, chorographies, civil and religious histories, natural histories, a variety of belletristic productions, and newspaper essays, as the foundations for an intellectual history stage that dominated colonial British American historiography for at least a generation in the wake of World War II and seems to have had no counterpart in early Latin American studies. Only during the last quarter century have a few historians begun to use similar materials to explore the intellectual and cultural development of Hispanic America with a comparable level of detail and sophistication.¹²

Because British America, like the rest of the Americas outside greater Mexico and Peru, lacks the extensive indigenous language sources that scholars such as Lockhart and his students have exploited so brilliantly for the Nahuatl-speaking polities of central Mexico, it has, of course, missed the New Philology phase that has been so prominent in recent early modern Latin American studies. It has, however, participated fully in the eclecticism characteristic of much recent work on early Latin America: the rise of ethnohistory and the interest in indigenous peoples, the reexamination of African slavery, the focus on women's history and gender definitions, the exploration of transatlantic intellectual connections in political, economic, social, educational, and religious life, the turn to cultural history and the emergence of creole or American cultural systems and identities, and perhaps even the development of a new interest in the history of secondary centers and peripheral areas in the Americas. In both colonial Latin American and British American studies, moreover, much of this recent work has relied less upon the use of new kinds of sources than upon revisiting and requestioning documents that have long been familiar to historians. Indeed, some of this work is driven not by sources but by the absence of sources and by the theory that scholars have generated to help them fill the historical silences present in the records.

In view of the fact that early Latin American and colonial British American historians are part of the same general historical community, these similarities in historiographical development are hardly surprising. No matter how different their sources or the cultures they study, both sets of historians are equally subject to the same professional intellectual fashions that make social history the darling of one generation and cultural history the central interest of the next. And the parallels could be extended to the historiographies of the fragmented early modern American enterprises of both the French and the Dutch.¹³

As one dips even casually into the historiographies of the early modern colonial Americas, however, one senses that the parallels and correspondences extend beyond historiography to substantive issues involving structures and processes. The first impression is one of extraordinary and fundamental difference. Iberian American polities were established a full century before those of the north Europeans—before the Protestant and Catholic Reformations had occurred, before the chivalric model had lost its appeal, and before the international market system was well developed. Within a generation of contact, moreover, the Spanish happened upon, conquered, and occupied the two areas with the greatest mineral wealth and the largest concentrations of indigenous peoples in the Americas. The post-conquest societies that the Spanish constructed in New Spain and Peru were the New World's great exceptions. Nowhere else was mineral wealth so readily accessible or native political and social development so complex. The presence of such numerous peoples required extensive adaptation on the part of the Spanish as well as the indigenes. Although the Spanish used indigenous labor to work the mines, the ranches, and the agricultural settlements they established, they eventually negotiated the system of two republics—Spanish and Indian—that permitted the indigenes a degree of self-government under the Spanish crown. At least in part because of the vast wealth they acquired through these conquests, the Spanish, moreover, were able to invest large sums of money and considerable manpower in evangelization. Through the mission system, combining civil and religious pacification, these efforts extended well beyond the sedentary indigenous empires of New Spain and Peru.

Encountering no similarly exploitable cultures, the Portuguese American settlements in Brazil exhibited quite different relationships with the indigenes, spent far fewer resources upon their evangelization, and established flourishing agricultural and cattle-raising societies before finding great mineral wealth a century and a half after their first effective settlement. In many respects, Spanish polities established in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries beyond the areas of highly developed indigenous states and great mineral wealth—in Central America, New Granada, Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, Rio de la Plata—were, like Brazil, the products less of conquest than of settlement and focused on agriculture and livestock.

Despite these differences, the various Iberian polities were profoundly similar. They shared an attachment to Roman Catholicism, and they were unusually inclusionary and even fusionist, in two senses: first, they incorporated indigenes and Africans into the legal and political systems they established, and second, they generated the extensive mixed populations that by the early nineteenth century could credibly claim to be the people of Brazil or Mexico.¹⁴ Established a full century later and also lacking mineral wealth and highly developed indigenous societies, the French colonies were similar to the Iberian colonies in their Catholicism, the extensiveness of their efforts at evangelization, their mixed-race populations, and the civil spaces those populations occupied.

In all these respects, the situation was far different in British and Dutch American polities established at roughly the same time as the French, after the Protestant Reformation, just as the new international trading system that would reach full flower in the early nineteenth century was taking off. Neither the Dutch nor the British encountered a densely populated indigenous empire nor discovered any mines. They spent little energy and less funds on the evangelization of the indigenes, and they established polities that were—implicitly with regard to the indigenes and explicitly with regard to imported Africans and their descendants—much more exclusionary than those established by the Iberians. The mixed populations they generated, while not insignificant, were never numerous or powerful enough to appropriate the title of the people.

As the above sketch suggests, there can be little doubt that, within the vast Iberian American world, colonial outcomes were determined less by cultural differences among Europeans than by physical differences, economic potentialities, and the nature and density of indigenous populations in occupied areas. Spaniards and Portuguese shared a common religion, albeit one more heterodox and independent of Rome than historians from Protestant countries used to assume. They also shared a civil law tradition with Roman origins and scrupulous written records. To instruct them in their forays in the Americas, they both had had extensive contact with non-Christian peoples: Moors in Iberia and North Africa, Guanches in the Canary Islands, and, for the Portuguese, peoples along the west coast of Africa and around the Indian Ocean. Notwithstanding these and other broad cultural similarities, however, the colonial process produced a wide variety of different kinds of political societies in the Iberian American world, differences not just between Spanish and Portuguese colonies but within the Spanish Empire and within Portuguese Brazil.

If we extend the field of comparison to include the polities established by North Europeans in the West Indies and North America, however, we may discover that cultural differences were more important. Certainly, considerations of what sort of resource environment and indigenous societies were encountered and what the economic potential of an area was were paramount in determining the nature of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Perspectives
• Part Two: Governance
• Part Three: Identities
• Part Four: Social Construction
• Index